Description:
We've argued that societal stratification is "both a condition and a process" (Kerckhoff, 2000). The former captures what the distribution of valued resources (e.g., money, education) among other things look like in a society. The question, most simply, is 'who gets what'? In this exercise, we'll examine contemporary and historical data on financial resources. First, we'll look at individual earnings, which is defined as the money a person makes from working and includes such things as wages, salary, or a form of self-employment and expressed as an annual amount. We'll also investigate historical trends in family income. Looking at these financial resrouce replicattes and complements some of our text's (Chapter 5 in R. Rothman's Inequality and Stratification, 4th ed.) discussion of economic inequality (e.g., family income, CEO pay, net worth). Our data come from various Census Bureau sources, including its decennial census and its monthly Current Population Survey.